


Cracked

by Jane St Clair (3jane)



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-05
Updated: 2011-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-22 06:35:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3jane/pseuds/Jane%20St%20Clair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven of Nine on dirt and gaps in vocabulary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cracked

Cold.  She was cold.

It took a long time for anything else to penetrate that thought.    
There was pain that spread across her arms and torso, but she was only  
vaguely aware of it.  Her head hurt, and a heaviness in it would not  
let her focus.  She must have a concussion.  She was bleeding,  
somewhere down on her leg.  One eye, the human one, wouldn't open.    
The other one still sent its mechanical impulses, but her brain  
couldn't process them properly.  Her brief glimpses of the darkened,  
dusty space around her made her sickeningly dizzy.  Seven wondered if  
she might be going to throw up.

How long had she been here?  Hours, maybe.  Away from the ship, it was  
hard to tell how much time had passes.  And having been unconscious,  
she thought wryly, made it even harder to tell.  But long enough.

Long enough to understand that she probably wasn't getting out.

She hadn't thought about that so much when she'd beamed down.    
Lieutenants Torres and Kim's communicator signals had been lost in the  
magnetic tangle of the planet's crust.  She and Commander Tuvok had  
transported down with signal boosters.  If they had to leave the  
equipment behind to rescue the people, it was a small price to pay.    
Kim and Torres had been found easily enough, but in the first moment's  
of re-transport, Seven had felt the degradation and realized that the  
equipment couldn't maintain their patterns without manual input.

So she hadn't thought about it much, either, when she stepped out of  
their collective beam and went to work.  Nor when they disappeared and  
the signal booster shorted and she was alone in the dark.  Not until  
the second transport beam, reaching blindly, had flashed brightly  
across the cavern ceiling and found no living person.  Only rocks that  
destabilized and fell.  There was very little she remembered from that  
time to this, however long that was.

Hours.

Days.

Maybe if they had to leave the Borg girl behind, that was a small  
price to pay, too.

Seven couldn't believe how much she hurt.  Shards of rock pressed into  
her sides, prodding at bruises and the sensitive edges of her  
implants.  If she could move, just a little, she might be able to get  
more comfortable.

It took several tries to manoeuver herself into a sitting position.    
The Borg tracework on her left hand sent shrieking, disconnected  
impulses to her, the cybernetic version of pain.  Pain, she knew, was  
the body's way of reporting that it was damaged.  Somewhat  
irrationally, she wished that she could acknowledge her body's message  
so that it might shut up.  Or.  What was it that Lieutenant Paris had  
said, the last time he came back shattered from an away mission?  Pain  
is good.  It lets you know you're still alive.  Knowing Paris, the  
line probably wasn't original, but it was comforting.

Focus on that.  You are still alive.

And in spite of her body's objections, she was sitting now, her back  
against the cavern wall, her knees pulled tightly against her breasts,  
her arms wrapped around them, hands clutching one another.  Holding  
herself together.  It was a good enough position in which to die.  Of  
blood loss, of dehydration, of asphyxiation, of the terrible cold that  
didn't seem to have anything to do with the air temperature.

She wanted to make a noise.  She hadn't heard anything since waking  
except the sound of her own stricken breathing.  She wanted to say  
something.  To see if her voice still worked.  It would prove that she  
was still alive.

"Well, fuck."

The Captain would have been proud.  It was idiomatically perfect.

***

You suggested once, Kathryn, that I might have another family, outside  
the Borg.  Cousins and grandparents.  There are fragments of them I  
remember.  I remember my cousins' bedrooms and their toys.  I remember  
my grandmother's blond hair going grey.

I remember that my grandparents lived on Earth, and they were farmers.    
My grandmother kept a two-hectare garden behind the machine shed.  She  
planted it, weeded it, harvested it by hand.  She watered it with a  
back-and-forth sprinkler that did one ten square-metre patch at a  
time.  She grew beets.  The back of the garden had a raspberry hedge  
as tall as trees.

I remember visiting her with my cousins.  She came out to us with a  
quart of raspberries in a green plastic bowl and a gallon of peas in  
the pod.  Then she took all us girls and settled us down on the field  
stone porch and told us not to come back inside until we were dirty.    
I ripped my shirt on an ancient barbed-wire fence and bled a little.    
My cousin Karen dug a raspberry cane out of the compost pile and  
whipped me across the back of the leg with it.  I think we trampled  
the snapdragons.

My grandmother stripped all three of us, and dropped us in the tub  
together.  Her bathroom had no shower.  It smelled of old hand lotion.

Later, she dressed in my pajamas with bears on them, and I asked her,  
Why didn't you tell us not to?  Not to get hurt?  Not to get hit?  Not  
to eat so much we threw up?

She said, You would have done it anyways.  Go to bed and stay out of  
my raspberries.

I can see her in you, Kathryn.

My grandmother went outside after dark in her nightgown and rubber  
boots.  She built a fire on the gravel drive and seared the composted  
raspberry canes away.

***

Eighteen hours was what it took.  The time began with B'Elanna  
Torres' stricken look when she realized that the failed second beam-  
out had caused at least a partial cave-in.  After ten hours, the  
Doctor had come into engineering and ordered Torres to bed.  Kathryn  
had watched from her perch as the hologram rested one flickering hand  
on the engineer's shoulder to escort her out and didn't comment.  She  
wasn't thinking anymore, except to notice that half the ship's  
population now seemed to reside in engineering.

In the beginning, Kathryn had made herself a promise.  They weren't  
leaving anyone behind.  Ever.  Even if all that was left to haul back  
up was a bloody corpse.

*please, don't let her be dead*

Maybe they had a solution.  An argument between Paris and Vorik had  
spawned a bastard child of logic and Tom's glittering intuition.  If a  
warp-field could be incorporated into the transport beam, if the  
magnetic patterns of the nameless planet's crust could be calculated,  
if everything was where they expected it to be . . .  the rescuer  
should be able to walk through solid stone.  If.

She couldn't ask anyone to do this.  She went herself.

A strange moment in the transporter room, when Paris sped up to her,  
stopped and stared, then pressed pressed his forehead to her hands.    
Whispered, "Captain . . . ," and turned those ice-blue eyes of his on  
her.

Kathryn hugged him hard, briefly, stepped away.  "I'm always careful,  
Tom."

Then the wet, open-mouthed kiss of the modified beam and she was  
standing in a space so tiny she could light every niche with her hand  
lamp.  There was still oxygen, and the draft told her the air was  
circulating.  The rocks scattered around her feet had blood on them.

Even with the added light, she almost didn't see Seven until the girl  
raised her head.  The clothes and blonde hair were so covered in dust  
that she might have been part of the geology.  Kathryn caught a flash  
of blue eyes before Seven dropped her head again to bury her face in  
her knees.  Thin shoulders under the filthy catsuit trembled.  Soft  
sounds.  Seven crying.

Contained as she was in the modified transporter beam, it took Kathryn  
several seconds to cross the small space between them.

"Seven."

Whimper.  Seven's body was chillingly cold to the touch.

"Oh Seven."  Kathryn moved as if she were in deep water, stretching  
the field around the figure on the ground.  She only felt it close  
completely when she knelt and wrapped her arms around the cyborg  
woman.  Rocking that shaking body against her shoulder, crooning  
wordlessly to try to calm her down.  "Okay, it's okay.  Hush now."

Whispered, "I thought . . ."

"No, no, Seven.  I wouldn't leave you."

Tears.  Nothing like the screaming fits Seven had thrown at her in the  
beginning, when they'd done war over the girl's wish to return to the  
Borg collective.  This was fear.  Fear of losing that she'd seen in  
Tom's eyes when she promised to be careful.  And the fear of being  
alone.  Her poor Seven, who'd spent eighteen hours in this dark,  
silent place.  How long had she been crying?  Kathryn pressed her lips  
against the dusty blond hair.

*come on, Tuvok, pull us back*

She couldn't tell exactly when Seven released her own knees and  
wrapped both arms around the captain, but she felt the shifting warp  
field as long-fingered hands clutched at her uniform.  "It's all  
right.  I would never have left you behind.  Never."

Already captured in the beam, Kathryn didn't feel the switch from the  
planet to Voyager.  The transporter room was dark and empty and warm.    
Only Tuvok crouched by her shoulder, studying his captain with her  
arms and legs tangled in the blonde girl's, one eyebrow slightly  
raised and a curiosity in his eyes he couldn't hide.  But he wasn't  
judging, yet, any more than Seven was willing to let go.

***

The Borg, Kathryn, are something I said you could never understand.    
You said you could imagine.  but there are whole months and years I  
spent with them that even I don't remember.  I was a child.

I lived with the Borg for eighteen human years.  They changed my body  
and my mind.  I know you only see horror in them; that makes it  
difficult to explain.  What I need you to understand is that what I  
was doing never mattered to me.  I was within the collective.  It was  
incredible pleasure.  If you can imagine, as you say you can:

In the places where dimensions touch there are colours that the light  
spectrum of this galaxy cannot express.

Transwarp travel is the possibility of moving to any point in the  
universe.  For the second of initiation, all destinations are equally  
possible.

A sentient race, in the course of its evolution, will develop between  
five and ten thousand languages.  The Borg have encountered and  
assimilated eight thousand four hundred seventy nine such races.  All  
languages contain words for love, death, and curiosity.  Very few  
distinguish between mind and heart.

Ecstasy in a cybernetic touch, kiss of implants and energy.

There are 3.2 x 10 to the 18th power Borg, and all of them dream.

What your poet said:  I sing the body electric!

***

She left sickbay at 0214 hours.  The Doctor objected, growled at her  
that she ought to try to keep normal human hours, and she ignored him.    
Ignored, too, his admonishment to go back to the cargo bay and rest.    
Instead, she walked the length of the ship, listening to the internal  
hum of the ship's bio-neural circuits and mechanical structures.  In  
her human auditory range, there was only a soft hiss.  Her implants  
left her with a huge sense of the ship in motion.  Electrical pulses  
surged, information raced through a multitude of optic connections,  
human and non-human crew members slept.

In the stern of the ship, she opened a random panel and let her  
cybernetic tracework merge with the ship's systems.  Listened to it  
for long minutes.  Then closed it and paced back towards astrometrics.

Her star map lit up as soon as she entered. *Her* star-map.  Her  
creation, almost entirely.  Ensign Kim's contributions had been  
worthy, but the system was her creation.  He would have been decades  
constructing it on his own.  And he never came in when she wasn't  
there.  So it was hers.  Logical and irrational.  She wondered if the  
Captain would be proud of that moment of distasteful humanity.

"I thought you'd be here."

"Hello, Captain."

Light fell across her legs from the door.  If she turned around, the  
Captain would be there, out of uniform and pushing stray hair out of  
her eyes with one hand.  She sank into her Borg senses for a moment  
and identified the woman's perfume, her body-scent, the fabric of her  
clothes.  Something synthetic and swirling -- a night robe, perhaps --  
dyed blue-base red.  

*raspberry, Seven*

*yes, Captain*

She didn't turn, but eventually the Captain came to stand beside her  
under the optic display.  Ten thousand, four hundred twenty-seven  
stars arrayed and rearranged themselves minutely to account for the  
ship's continued movements.

Seven had a peripheral view of bare feet, and enough skin above them  
that she wondered what, exactly, the Captain wore under her robe.  She  
stood at the rail, leaning over it slightly, as if she could step into  
the light fields by touching them.  Seven stayed where she was, seated  
on the floor with her knees pulled up in front of her.  It was only  
moderately comfortable, but it unnerved the Captain more than she was  
willing to admit, and that was an advantage for the moment.

"We wouldn't have left you behind, you know."

"You should have.  It endangered the ship to remain in orbit for so  
long."

Swirl of raspberry at the corner of her eye as the Captain knelt.  A  
warm hand settled on Seven's shoulder and squeezed slightly.  She  
remembered sitting on the transporter platform with this woman for the  
better part of half an hour (twenty seven minutes, forty-one seconds),  
with her ear pressed to the Captain's heart.  Human in its pulse,  
unreasonably warm.

"Don't be stupid.  I'm not leaving you anywhere."  Seven acknowledged  
that the Captain's usual construction of that phrase was simply *I'm  
not leaving anyone behind* long before she acknowledged that she'd  
relaxed at the words and that her temple now rested against Kathryn's  
collarbone.

There were words she was supposed to use in such situations.  "Thank  
you."

Crooked grin.  "You're welcome."  The astral projection's light was  
unflattering; every line in Kathryn's face was starkly enhanced.  A  
caricature of expression: sarcasm and affection.  The silver strands  
just above her ears were entirely visible.

By turning her face just a little, Seven was able to press her lips  
into the V of Kathryn's robe and kiss the thin skin there.  Bone  
underneath it, and a human heart underneath the bone.  Three dozen  
freckles scattered over that flesh.  Taste of salt and skin -- barely  
sour, and very warm.  There was a hand lacing through her hair,  
holding her close in.  It wasn't a threat, just a presence.  One  
guiding her lips into the curve of a breast, the hook of her nose to  
press the fabric back.  Warm, soft flesh underneath it.

Kathryn's breast gave under her lips.  It slid into her mouth at the  
barest suck and stayed there while she worked the nipple with her  
tongue and the blunt edges of her teeth.  Feeling the faint pulse of  
blood in each vessel under the surface.

"I should tell you to stop."  Soft and hoarse, as though she couldn't  
quite breathe.

"Don't.  You can disapprove later."  Kissing the warm flesh where the  
underside of Kathryn's breast usually touched her ribcage.  Pressing  
the robe open and kissing down to her waist.  "You can . . ." kiss ".  
. . write a formal reprimand . . ." kiss in the indentation her  
uniform trousers had marked at her waist ". . . regarding my behaviour  
. . ." kiss in the navel, dipping her tongue in and observing the  
attendant shiver with something between clinical detachment and  
ecstatic appreciation ". . . and submit it to whomever you wish."  Her  
tongue brushed the rim of Kathryn's pubic hair, taking measure of the  
soft skin and the fragments of grey scattered through the red.

One more nudge and Kathryn leaned back on her elbows, spread her  
knees, and let Seven kiss the rest of the way down.  Let her take  
measure of the scent she found there, sharp and bright and terribly  
organic, and the shape of this new flesh.  Let her kiss the outer  
lips and the inner passage and kiss her deeply there, reaching up  
towards her heart.  

At some point in the process, she must have curled herself around  
Kathryn's legs on the floor, because when she looked up with her face  
soaking wet, that was how they were lying.  

"Oh, God."

"What, Captain?"

"I didn't think you ever smiled like that."

Seven considered that most likely she never had in human company.  But  
the sharp contrast of the Captain's primness and her current debauched  
state was amusing enough to twist her lips into something dangerously  
close to a smirk.  It was, perhaps, a peculiarly Borg form of humour.    
She would offer to explain it when she next needed a conversational  
advantage.

"Yes, Captain."

"Kathryn."  Another gasp as she bent once more and licked the woman's  
still-swollen clitoris, delicately.

"Kathryn."

Long, warm hands pulled her up against Kathryn's body and held her  
there.  The contact was something she needed, but she hadn't yet  
adapted her social postures to the hug in any consistent way, and she  
knew how awkwardly the two of them fit together.  A little more  
comfortably after Kathryn calmly rearranged Seven's limbs, then her  
own, but only a little.  She was between Kathryn's spread legs, close  
enough to kiss her, and none of the sharp bones of her arms were  
pressing into more vulnerable abdominal or mammary flesh.  If the  
sprawl of her legs left something to be desired, she would correct it  
to a more efficient position when she next had the leisure to  
contemplate such a thing.

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Thank you."

A smile she could feel against her hair.  "Any time."

Warm fingers stroked the back of her neck while she continued to press  
her lips against the Captain's throat.  Seven thought that she should  
say something.  Explain the memories that she was still piecing back  
together, or the human emotions that cracked her reason at unsuitable  
moments.  Why her life with the Borg had been beautiful enough that  
she should still want to cling to it.  She was going to have to find  
words, soon, for the expanding, sharp lights of knowledge in the Borg  
collective mind, and the disorientation she still felt at their  
absence.  Just as she was going to need words to describe the  
intrusive desire that shook her at moments when she touched this  
woman's body.

"You should come to bed."

"I am not tired.  I do not sleep, as such, and in any case the Doctor  
kept me under heavy sedation for a number of hours.  I would prefer to  
remain alert for a time if I may."

"Fine.  Have it your way.  But I'm going back to bed.  Do you want to  
come?"  

The Captain stood, and straightened her robe, and offered a hand.    
Majestic, really, this woman.  If one were to put a spiritual or  
mythological name to her, she would be mother-goddess to the ship.

Seven didn't answer.

"Come on.  If you don't want to sleep, you can read."

Seven followed her down the hallway, and listened the brush of bare  
feet against the threadbare carpeting.  If she let them, her  
autonomous functions would carry her the rest of the way to the  
Captain's quarters, and the remainder of her attention could focus on  
the suddenly-important gaps in her ability to express herself  
verbally.  The Captain would wake up in perhaps four hours, and by  
then there would be things that Seven needed to tell her.

[November 11, 2000]


End file.
